The goal of linguistics is to establish the nature of language faculty (FL), but knowledge of linguistics alone cannot get to this goal. The new trend of linguistics is thus to go together with other fields of areas, including psycholinguistics, biology, anthropology, archeology, and neuroscience. This interdisciplinary approach to language focuses not only on the fundamental basis but also the hard to answer question, providing a rather concrete solution to old questions. Among them are what forces the FL to emerge and why the FL is unique to humans. Hauser et al. (2002) classifies the FL into FLB and its subset, FLN, arguing that communication is just a secondary need and that the FLN consists only of recursion. Jackendoff and Pinker (2005), on the contrary, claims that nothing can emerge without a selectional pressure in the evolution of human beings. This paper evaluates these two positions, and proposes an alternative approach which assumes that the FLN undergoes modification with respect to various cognitive factors, including memory span and capacity related to age. This proposal will be supported by the empirical and experimental evidence from linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience.
1. Introduction
2. FLN vs. FLB
3. Easy Processing
4. Cognitive and Neural Aspects
5. Conclusion